¹ The driver-side windshield wiper kept coming loose and wouldn’t wipe the windshield.

3761 ways to go Bonkers © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I was up playing Wild Arms 3 till about 3 am as I just couldn’t sleep. Most likely due to an excessive amount of munching on holiday goodies while downing glass, after glass of soda¹. I found one monster to fight that took around an hour to defeat but it jumped my characters up 4–7 levels! *grin* Then when I eventually got to bed; I slept poorly. Our apartment is just too dry this time of year and our little humidifier stopped working. This causes me to keep waking up with sinus headaches and a terrible thrist. I got out of bed about 8:30 — 9 and went back to playing the video game a bit more. Shortly there after, Michelle got up and gave me my birthday present.

What’d she get me? A case of blue balls Bawls. Then after lazing around most of the day; we headed out to the local mall to meet some friends.

I’d foolishly asked a bunch of friends to join us in watching the Narina movie with a follow-up plan to eat dinner together. There was one point that I’d not factored in these plans. This year, my birthday fell on a Saturday. Just about the last Saturday before Christmas. Traffic was insane and people all around were grouchy, though we did run across some nice people that helped us get around the parking lot². We went over to the mall a little early and bought a new humidifer and then headed down to the theater. We got tickets, met up with our friends and went in to watch the The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

*whew* What a movie! While not perfect, it was probably as good as we could hope for from a Hollywood production.
High points:

• The actress playing Lucy was spot on. Most of the other actors cast in the movie were also quite good
• The backgrounds were gorgeous.
• The addition of the Nazi bombing run at the beginning of the movie really helped to give context to the time of the story.

Low points:

• The costuming on the witch. Her outfits were ugly and just didn’t work with the imagery I have in my head for the character. Though I do have to admit the black , soulless eyes did work for me.
• The witch was not nearly as afraid of Aslan as she should have been. In my memories of the book, the witch was terrified of Aslan but the movie seemed to put them on a more even footing.
• Maugrim’s voice. The actor doing the voice did a fine job, but being the only character without a british accent really stuck out and annoyed me.

Overall, I’d say it was worth seeing in the theater and it is something I’ll be adding to our DVD collection when it becomes available.

After the movie was over, we headed to the restaurant. Oh, I should mention we had called earlier in the day to try making reservations but were told they don’t do that for parties of less than 8. And that they would have plenty of room for the 6 of us. When we got there; we were told it would be a 2 hour wait. We decided to switch to the Oyama Sushi restaurant. They seated us within minutes of our arrival (even though they were already pretty packed). Then they plied us with drinks until our food was ready³. We had a jolly time chatting and drinking (non-alcholic, for the most part) but all good things do come to an end and eventually we all headed home. It was a very good day and while I ain’t dead yet; I am a bit tired so good night, sleep tight and don’t let the space bugs bite!

¹ a.k.a. pop to you heathens.
² A few people threw their cars into reverse to open up bigger areas for us to drive through and things of that nature.
³ It turns out this weekend contains not only my birthday and practically the last weekend before Christmas but it’s also graduation weekend for the University! No wonder everything was so packed today! This also explains why it took so long for our food to arrive.

Ain’t Dead Yet © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Let me ‘splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Buttercup is marry’ Humperdinck in a little less than half an hour. And every Wednesday, myself and a few co-workers head over to the Terrapin to get a cup of real coffee². Almost without fail, I order a “Grand Canyon” which is 2 shots of espresso, steamed milk, a shot of dark chocolate syrup and a shot of mango syrup. *yum* When I got there today, I picked up their tea menu and Rob (one of the owners) ordered me to put it down. I explained about the congestion and he accepted it, but I wouldn’t say he was happy about it. Then I ordered their Chinese Breakfast tea, as the description sounded similar to the yunnan jig tea I’ve mentioned before. Hot caffeinated beverages acquired, we headed back to the office and I headed back to the mountain of email that had arrived while I’d been out. After clearing out that mess (most of it went straight to the trash), I started/continued testing a problem I’d been working on Friday. I’m still processing the data for that test now, but I’m also starting to wonder if I should have stayed home again.

Today, like Sunday, I woke up feeling better than the day before. The problem is like Sunday, I didn’t stay home. Sunday, Ariesna & I were invited to go to Niabi Zoo over in Illinois with some of her family. It was a fun day and I took quite a few pictures³ but by the end of the day, I was totally wiped out and realized I should have stayed home. Now I’m not wiped out (so far) but I do feel more tired than I should from just sitting at a desk, staring at a computer screen. Ah well, not much I can do about that now.

BTW, last night I upgraded Cath’s site to the current version of WordPress. I was kind of annoyed at how long it took but then most of that time was taken up my crappy ftp client having problems deleting the files for the old version from the webserver. Mind you I was booted into Windows at the time⁴ which undoubtably was part of the problem. But I did eventually get it done and wouldn’t you know it looks nearly identical to what it did before. I’d call that a good sign for a seamless upgrade, but I’m waiting to hear back from her before I call it a success. So why the upgrade? In part to patch some old security holes and in part because all the new/interesting stuff for WP is happening on the newer versions. This way if she feels like going out and picking a different theme⁵; it should be trivial to install it.

Anyway, one of the reasons I was annoyed with the amount of time it took was last night also happened to be the season premier for NCIS. I’ve been a fan of this show for a while now, but season 2’s finale was murder. Quite literally, as they killed off one of the NCIS agents. I was very much looking forward to seeing where they’d take the show next, but with upgrading the site and some other things I didn’t get to watch the show as thoroughly as I would have liked. From what I did see, I’m not sure how enjoyable season 3 will be. I don’t care for the new characters they introduced into the NCIS office (Director Jenny Shepard and Agent Ziva David). The romatic background between Gibbs & Shepard could be an interesting subplot but they seem to be pushing it too hard in an episode which should be dealing more directly with the remaining NCIS agents working to find Kate’s killer. And then to make the episode a 2-parter leaving us on another cliff-hanger is distinctly annoying. *sigh* I guess we’ll have to wait and see if they can pull this up with next week’s episode.

¹ Next to chicken noodle soup, hot tea works best for clearing up congestion and helping me feel better.
² The first part of this paragraph is a quote from The Princess Bride. And when I say coffee, I mean flavored espresso.
³ I’ll see about posting some of them later. Incidentally, there was a classic car show being held on the zoo’s premises so don’t be surprised if you see more car than animals photos.
⁴ I had some work to do that required M$ Word, as OpenOffice Writer couldn’t properly edit the fancy formating in the document (originally created in M$ Word).
⁵ By perhaps looking through the themes in Alex King’s Theme Browser.…

Feeling Better & Mumbling Randomly © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Later today, I’ll be posting PLotW¹ but before that happens here’s a different link that you should really check out. Gossamer Commons is a relatively recent webcomic, started back in March 2005 by Eric Burns and Greg Holkan. Eric writes, Greg draws. The premise is something like so; the main character, Keith, has saved the life of a fairy child. Since he did this while knowing that seeing the fairy would mark him for death²; the Fairies owe him 1 boon of Keith’s choosing. As Keith has longed to be a published author; he requests, as his boon, that the Fairies give him a muse so he can great the great American novel. A novel that will inspire generations to come and will be read by annoyed college freshmen four hundred years from now. :) Mr. Holkan uses a variety of methods in his artwork on the strip and so far it’s working really well, but the thing that keeps me coming back and reading the new strip is the writing (done by Mr. Burns.). Since I’m not much of a writer myself; I charge you with looking at today’s strip for an example how good this strip can be.

Keep up the good work fellas, we’ll be watching you!

¹ Pukka’s Links of the Week
² Apparently in the GC world just seeing one of the Fairies will automagically mark you for death.

Gossamer Commons © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

One of the many lovely gifts that Ariesna and I received for our wedding was a Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G router.¹ Since a wireless router is useless without something to connect to it; I went out and picked up a Linksys WPC54GS Wireless-G Notebook Adapter. Since I was still kind of dazed from the whole wedding/honey-night experience; I didn’t stop to check whether the router had SpeedBooster and if I could get the card online for much cheaper than I could in the store.² I had cash in my pocket and techno-lust burning in my heart. I bought the card, took it home and immediately started mucking about with my laptop to try to get it to work. In a previous fit of whimsey, I had wiped M$ Windows from my laptop and replaced it with SuSE 9.0 Pro. Since APT is such a wonderful thing, I used it to keep SuSE updated; rather I used it to update SuSE on the laptop whenever I booted it up to use it. So the first thing I tried doing in my quest to get wireless networking running on my laptop was to run APT and grab all the latest stuff for SuSE 9.0.

For the first time ever, APT let me down and in doing so it let me down badly. Something in my xserver configuration (or maybe the startup scripts) got hosed. I fiddled with it for a couple of days, but had no luck in correcting the problem. I could work around it, but not fix it. Once I got to that point, I tried to load some missing software I needed to get the wireless card to work, but the software was not listed in the APT repositories I was using. This is especially problematic as the CD-ROM in this laptop tends to be very flakey, so I couldn’t hope to go back to my original CDs and load it from there. In the meantime, I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu (Hoary 5.04). I did this planning on borrowing the modular CD-ROM drive of a co-worker with the same ancient Dell laptop to replace SuSE on my laptop (if all else failed). Tonight, I was home alone and annoyed that I still didn’t have my wireless network up & running. So I ran over to Best Buy, picked up a spindle of CD-Rs, burned Ubuntu to disc and tried installing it.

Much to my utter amazement and total surprise, my laptop decided that it liked this burned CD and allowed me to install Ubuntu without error. It took several hours to do it, but eventually I was looking at an incredibly ugly Ubuntu desktop. This struck me as odd, but then I realized it was displaying at 800x600 when my laptop’s native resolution is 1024x768. So a bit of googling later and a quick run of: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and I was looking at the very pretty version of Ubuntu’s desktop. About an hour later, after following these directions in the NdisWrapper wiki, and I have wireless networking running on my laptop. Now I just need to look into a 2nd battery for the laptop so I can have be a bit further away from the wall socket than my power cord lets me go. Still, it’s so very nice not having to sit in my lousy desk chair to do some work on the computer. It’ll be even nicer when I can put the funds together to build a MythTV box for the living room to watch all my anime with. :)

Updated 2005-05-27, 19:55 GMT-06:00: I noticed a typo in the dpkg-reconfigure command above, so I’ve edited this post to correct it.

¹ Yes, I do realize that considering this a lovely gift puts me completely and forever in the “geek” category,
² The answers to those questions were: No and Yes.

Sweet, Sweet Wireless Internet © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Still, being home all day gave me a chance to catch up on watching some of the anime I’ve been downloading. Some of it’s good and some of it’s not, which means I’ve got more to watch but I’ve also deleted some to free up drive space. More free drive space, means I can download more newer stuff. :)

In other news, one of my slightly, older posts has been getting a bit of attention from somebody out there. I guess I’ll have to keep watching that post to see how the discussion goes.

Fah © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

¹ Who? Why that would be Dr. Doom of course! *sheesh* That was a silly question.

Fantastic Four © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Anyway, while taking a break I ran across this article over at CSM. I’ve felt that frustration as well when I was younger. Back in a high school painting class I took; I was working on painting a lighthouse on an icy shore. The teacher came over and said my waves were wrong, took the brush from my hand and painted the waves the way she thought they should be. After all these years¹, I still feel somewhat annoyed/bitter that she did that. Ah well, not much I can do about it.

Our assignment was to paint watercolor landscapes. I painted trees with round tops, modeled after the pruned trees I saw as I walked to school each morning. I liked my painting; my teacher did not. She said my trees looked like lollipop trees; that they didn’t look like real trees, although they looked like the trees I knew.

Mrs. E picked up a paintbrush and painted over my trees to make them look the way she thought trees should look.

For the rest of my school years, I never voluntarily took an art class.

Anyway to Mrs. Kennar I say, though I’m not a teacher and I did continue taking art classes² in high school and into college; I’ll never paint over your lollipop trees.

¹ While I’ve been told that I look much older than my actual age (28); I’ve been through enough other experiences that thinking high school feels like I’m trudging through ancient history.
² Though perhaps not surprisingly, I haven’t done any painting since I took that class.

“don’t paint over their lollipop trees.” © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name='default_category'

For a bit there, I also thought I’d figured out which function should be calling this sort of query but after a bit more digging into my options; I realized that on my test install, I’d enabled the Advanced editing controls. Bah, back to the drawing board. Well, back to the drawing board tomorrow; I’m getting too tired tonight to continue digging through WP’s code to figure out the problem any further.

Oh and for the record, I’m not the only one that is annoyed by this.

WordPress Default Category © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Of course, it wasn’t all greenery there; there were plenty of buildings all over the place. Some where towering monstrosities of concrete; while others were traditional Japanese houses made of wood. There was a convenience store on partically every corner, though normal grocery stores were a bit harder to find. This reminds me of another thing about Japan that seems odd to me now; zoning ordinances. I don’t know if they just don’t have any, if they’re lot less strict than American ones or what, but you could be walking down a street and it would shift from stores to houses to stores to apartments in a blink of an eye. If you’re like me and don’t read kanji; this means you can never be entirely sure if the building you are looking at is somebody’s house or their business or both or something else entirely.

Speaking of confusion, it is my understanding that the average Japanese person has several more years of schooling in English than the average American has schooling in any foreign language, but I have to wonder if they really understand English sometimes. For instance one day while walking around Nishi Kasai; I spotted a young Japanese girl wearing a green t-shirt that said “daddy” across the wrong of it. I’ve also seen other Japanese girls wearing t-shirts and tanktops that promote PlayBoy magazine. I really have to wonder if those ladies have any idea of what their clothing was promoting. Of course, I can’t be too judgemental about their shirts. I’ve got one with some characters that sort of look like kanji, but I have no idea what they mean either³.

Speaking of kanji reminds me of the only thing that really hit me as a bad bit of culture shock. Towards the end of our first week there; we visited a store called Mandrake. It’s this massive multistory geek shopping area, with used manga, anime cells, toys, costumes, etc… I’d been browsing through some of the manga; just trying to find something with cool artwork or maybe even just a really nice artbook and after I’d been in there a while all the multicolored kanji on the spines of the manga started to blend together and spin around a bit. It was extremely disorienting and is one of the reasons I didn’t much like going to Mandrake or really any bookstore while I was in Japan. Normally, I love going into bookstores and just browsing around; but since I don’t read any kanji it was painful for me to go in and see all these books I couldn’t read. Fortunately, you don’t have to be able to read kanji to get around Tokyo or really any of the areas we visited. Signs in English were all over the place and we were traveling as a group. So we almost always had either AWelkin or Keki-san or some other person who was fluent in Japanese along to help us out.

On the other hand, I think having all that help wasn’t entirely good for the class because it seemed several people would do everything they could to avoid having to speak Japanese themselves. We had 3 half-days of Japanese lessons from Sato-sensai and some people appeared to speak Japanese fairly well in class but then would suddenly lose all their Japanese skills once they left Sato-sensai’s class. I know my Japanese was very weak; but by the end of the trip, I could:

• introduce myself
• tell somebody what one of my hobbies was
• order my own food (if I could point at it, already knew what it was called or somebody could tell me what it was called)
• complain that the weather was hot⁴

I don’t know if that meant was I more independent/confident/foolish than my fellow students but it seemed to me that we were not in the U.S. so we should make every effort to speak the native language of the country we were in. This is just something that seemed to me as a basic form of courtesy that we could do for our “host country”.

Courtesy was another thing that I noticed and liked about Japan. People were nice to each other all over the place whether they knew one another or not. People would say sumimasen (excuse me/sorry/please) and arigatoo gozaimasu (thank you) at the drop of a hat; while back here in the States, it sometimes seems like you have to pratically save somebody’s life before they’ll say thank you.

Ok, enough already about what I did like; what didn’t I like? Well… their milk tasted a bit off from what I’m used to and rice cakes at breakfast time got old fast⁵. Also the heat was nearly unbearable and bonking my head in doorways was annoying. But none of those were major issues really, probably the biggest thing that would have annoyed me would be their attitude towards schedules. We were pretty heavily insulated from this thanks to AWelkin’s efforts but given some of the things we talked about over dinner that first night back; I get the impression that the Japanese do not view schedules as something you really set in stone (like we silly Americans do). It seems to me that they felt it was perfectly ok to rearrange the schedules at a moments notice and continue to arrange them until they were happy about it; without ever realizing that the silly foreigners were likely to get stressed about it (which we did, frequently). Still I was pretty well insulated from that so it wasn’t too bad. Probably the number one thing about Japan that disturbed me were their cemeteries; specifically those areas set aside for children who’d died. Usually, I’d see these with little statues (of a standing Buddha?, not sure need to ask AWelkin about that) with knitted bonnets and/or a bib. According to one discussion, I’d had with AWelkin about these statues⁶; the Japanese feel a need to honor all of their dead, including those children that died young, at birth, were aborted and what not. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all, as to me that seems to display a deep and abiding respect for life but seeing the children’s section of the cemeteries disturbed me on some fundamental level. It’s rather hard to describe; there was a sense of “this is really creepy” but overlaid with a sense of deep sadness. *shudder* Thinking about those parts of Japan still creeps me out a bit.

As this was my first trip outside of the U.S. (and the first plane ride that I can remember going on); I did end up learning a few things about myself:

• I can handle riding in a plane just fine, even in coach, but I’d rather be up front so I know when the plane is going to dip or turn and perhaps won’t be quite so put out by turbulence.
• With proper motivation, I can learn other languages fairly quickly. Note that I didn’t say well or in depth; just quickly.
• I’m still oblvious to flirting⁷.
• As worldly as I might want to appear to others; I get too big a kick out of being a tourist to not stop and stare at (or take pictures of) things that interest me.
• I enjoy traveling immensely.

¹ Translation: The final project of the course was to write one last journal entry talking about the trip and what the trip made me learn about myself.
² Switching from U.S. time to Japan time was easy, switching back has been brutal and probably wasn’t helped by giving blood yesterday.
³ I wore it during the homestay and Makoto-san didn’t know what they meant either. At least, he said he didn’t know but that could have been just him being nice and not telling me that it said something stupid or vulgar. *sigh* I have really need to learn how to read kanji!
⁴ It took me a few days to pick that one up and I really only got it after a bit of help from KO, but I ended up using it a lot!
⁵ Though I loved having the miso soup every day, yum!
⁶ The one where I found out they were for children.
⁷ AWelkin said that some of the art instructors were flirting with me during class. Ariesna has mentioned before that she’s noticed other girls flirting with me. *shrug* I still don’t really know what either one is talking about.

Reflections on Japan © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.